This Is Not a Film

Jafar Panahi, the director of numerous extraordinary films including The White Balloon and Crimson Gold, was accused of collusion against the Iranian regime and is currently appealing a prison sentence and a ban from filmmaking. From the confines of his apartment, Panahi secretly collaborated with a documentarian friend to film a day in his own life.

The result, This Is Not a Film, is a seemingly modest home movie that gradually becomes another astonishing entry in the rich Iranian tradition of merging documentary and fiction. The filming and release of This Is Not a Film is one of cinema’s most extraordinary acts of political and moral conviction; the film was sent to the Cannes Film Festival and smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick hidden inside a cake! (75 mins., video, Persian with English subtitles)